Florida Man’s anti-freedom mind-control agenda must be quashed

Associated Press news photo

“Freedom from indoctrination”? No, it’s that we’re to practice the Repugnican-fascists’ blatant indoctrination. Their backasswards, far-right-wing indoctrination is so good and true that it’s not indoctrination, you see, and every other viewpoint is “indoctrination.” (Repugnican-fascist Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a serious threat to our freedom despite claiming to be all about freedom, is pictured with his human props pushing his anti-freedom agenda in April 2022.)

Growing up in the Arizona public school system in the 1970s and 1980s, I was, indeed, indoctrinated.

Among much other bullshit, I was taught, at least indirectly if not also directly, that homosexuality is bad — sick, criminal, sinful, etc. (Mostly, it just wasn’t brought up at all — the erasure of an entire group of people is fun!)

Today, of course, we have same-sex marriage as the law of the land — and he-man Nick Offerman just very effectively played a gay man in a long-term same-sex relationship (with Murray Bartlett of the first season of “The White Lotus”) in the zombie-apocalypse TV series “The Last of Us,” a turn that no television show ever would have taken when I was growing up* — and in many if not most parts of the United States, many if not most of the homophobes who still remain among us keep their ignorant, hateful, bigoted, homophobic thoughts to themselves in polite company.

I was taught in the public school system that capitalism is perfect — Godly, even (in high school I had to take a pro-capitalist course propagandistically titled “free enterprise”) — and essentially I was taught that there is no viable alternative socioeconomic model, and that you’re crazy and/or evil for even suggesting (or even thinking) that there could be or should be (Love it or leave it, Commie!).

Seriously, though — how nice it is for the sociopathic profiteers among us to ensure that our public schools teach that our socioeconomic exploitation, in which millions of us are just wage slaves who in a nation whose beyond-ludicrous degree of income inequality grows larger and larger with each passing year are barely surviving, is the only option available to us.

This degree of mass mind control is nothing if not fucking Orwellian.

American history was taught to me in public school as an ever-progressive** march forward by overwhelmingly white people with a few minor oopsies and boo-boos along the way, but overall, God bless (white [that part always was understood if not always spoken aloud]) America, land of the free!

Conservatism, being all about keeping the stupid white man firmly entrenched in power and dominating the rest of us in perpetuity, still believes that today’s public school students should have the same experience that I did in the 1970s and 1980s. (Well, actually, I’m sure that even the public education that I received in the backasswards state of Arizona in the 1970s and 1980s is too “liberal” for them.)

It’s funny, because despite the right-wing attempt to indoctrinate me with the “right” sexual orientation, I’m nonetheless an out gay man in a long-term same-sex relationship. The years-long attempts to indoctrinate me didn’t succeed; apparently I am immune to such toxic indoctrination. (I’m an atheist, too, so “Christo”fascism, of which homophobia is part and parcel, didn’t get to me either; “God” and “Jesus” to me are on par with other mythical figures, such as Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny…)

And for decades I have had deep issues with capitalism — which for the most part is just systemic, legalized thievery that so often results in injury, destruction and even death — and I would much prefer to see a hybrid socioeconomic model in which the essentials of life are not for-profit and in which OK, sure, the non-essentials, including the luxury items, can be capitalized. (And I’m a strong supporter of Bernie Sanders, of course.)

And yes, American history, as it is taught in our public school system, is, of course, whitewashed, to say the least; I seem to remember one U.S. history textbook with the maudlin title of The Pageant of American History or the like. I’m sure that Nazi Germany taught the history of Germany something like this: The nation was forged by strong, manly, God-supported white men! Get in line behind God’s soldiers or die, unGodly bitches!

So of course I oppose Repugnican-fascist Ron DeSantis’ fascist attempts to control what is and what is not taught in the public schools of Florida — in the name of “freedom from indoctrination.” (Indeed, you’re free to believe and to teach whatever you want — as long as stupid, evil white man Ron DeSantis agrees with it. Freedom! Yay!)

If our public schools don’t give our students the tools they need to be well-adjusted and successful in modern life, then our schools are failing them (which, of course, they are, but that’s another blog piece…).

And teaching like it’s still the fucking 1950s is not setting up our students for success. It’s setting them up for failure as future wage slaves to our corporate overlords, believing that the socioeconomic exploitation of them is what God wants and is the only kind of life that they ever can have.

On a related note, Advanced Placement courses are high school courses for the college-bound and are voluntary, and so their curricula should be hands fucking off to opportunistic political swine like the First Amendment-hating and freedom-hating Ron DeFuckingSantis, whose attack on the Advanced Placement black American studies course induced the College Board, which created the course, to water it down.

Of course, what DeSantis would prefer is that black Americans (as well as other non-white and LGBT Americans) just be erased entirely, so I doubt that the AP’s watering down of its black American studies course will please Gov. Florida Man.

As the Advanced Placement cave-in demonstrates, DeSantis already is winning his war to control all American minds.

Obviously I agree with age-appropriate teaching; of course your average kindergartener won’t understand the nuances of human sexuality, socioeconomic systems, the good and the ugly of U.S. history (including, of course, racism and the struggle for women’s rights and for LGBT rights as well as for non-whites’ rights), debates around religion, etc.

But an Advanced Placement student should be mature enough to handle the more adult topics, and further, DeSantis is trying to limit not just what Florida’s public elementary and high schools may teach, but what Florida’s colleges and universities — which are supposed to be bastions of independent thought and free speech — may or may not teach.

Former “President” Pussygrabber, at least, is so juvenile and self-absorbed (he’s the fucking poster child for the baby boomers) that he doesn’t bother to attack our public schools and universities; he’s too busy pettily attacking his legions of enemies (and as it is with every dictator and would-be dictator, it’s very easy to get on his shit list: just refuse to ardently lick his ass) like a petulant, perpetually miffed teenaged girl, apparently unaware that the majority of the nation is way, way beyond his endless grievance bullshit and knows fully well that he lost the 2020 presidential election.

That Ron DeSantis wants to institute mind control not only in the nation’s third-most-populous state, but in the entire nation as president, makes him much more dangerous than is Pussygrabber, in my book.

DeSantis’ goal is to indoctrinate all Americans into believing that any kind of life outside of the fascist hellscape that he has in mind for all of us — with him as our Dear Leader, of course — is our only fucking option.

Thankfully, barring one of the many criminal probes into his many crimes actually taking mob boss Pussygrabber down within the next two years or so (I’m not holding my breath), I expect Pussygrabber to win the 2024 Repugnican presidential nomination.

Why?

Because too many other deluded narcissists within the Repugnican Party apparently also are going to run for the Repugnican presidential nomination for 2024 — including people who have a snowball’s chance in hell, such as Nikki Haley, Tim Scott, Mike Pompeo and Mike Pence — and, because the Repugnicans anti-democratically award all of a state’s delegates to the Repugnican National Convention to whichever Repugnican presidential candidate garners the most votes in that state, in 2024 Pussygrabber would benefit from a crowded Repugnican presidential field, just as he did in 2016.

Could Pussygrabber win in November 2024, though?

Um, he lost the national popular vote by millions of votes not only 2020, but in 2016 as well. History, methinks, is a guide on whether or not Pussygrabber could win back the White House in 2024.

Further, Pussygrabber eked out a “win” in 2016 only because of the anti-democratic Electoral College — and he did even that well only because at that time he was largely unknown, as least as a U.S. president.

Two impeachments, the deadly January 6, 2021, insurrection that he treasonously led, and innumerable investigations into his mob-boss-level criminal activity later, the kind of “president” that Pussygrabber was and would be again no longer is an unknown; we know the treasonous asshole abundantly well.

Therefore, no, I can’t see Pussygrabber winning the presidency in 2024. (Well, maybe he could if he were running against Kamala Harris, who we’re still waiting upon to finally find her political legs, but that’s another blog piece…)

Pussygrabber and 2024 aside, Ron DeSantis must never be president of the United States of America — and so I hope that Pussygrabber beats DeSantis for the Repugnican presidential nomination, because I can’t see Pussygrabber winning (well, “winning”) the White House ever again.

I can, however, see a fascist demagogue like DeSantis, who offers cut-and-dry, “common-sense” “solutions” to our problems and who freely and giddily scapegoats others for his own political gain, winning the presidency, especially when as a president he is unknown, as Pussygrabber was in 2016.

Our freedom of thought, on which all of our other freedoms depend, depends on those of us who truly value freedom — including, ironically, freedom from (fascist) indoctrination — stopping the fascist, anti-democratic, freedom-hating DeSantis in his fucking tracks.

DeSantis is a cancer that must not be allowed to spread outside of the backasswards state of Florida. He must be contained within that fucking swamp.

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*Seriously, though, the only reason I started to watch HBO’s “The Last of Us” is that it received good reviews, and I find the angle of zombification via fungal infection to be an interesting twist on a worn-out genre. (I tried to get into “The Walking Dead” several years ago but just couldn’t; I found the zombie genre to be tiresome already.)

So after two episodes of the establishment of the fungus zombies in “The Last of Us” (an aside: Can you kill them by spraying them with an anti-fungal, such as for athlete’s foot or jock itch?), I was surprised to see this “Brokeback Mountain”-like storyline plopped into the middle of the zombie action, and it actually works.

And while I had known that Nick Offerman would be in the third episode, I’d had no idea of the direction in which they took his character.

I mean, I imagine that plenty of homophobes have stopped watching the show after that third episode replete with man-on-man action, but to me, if you can drop in a gay love story in the middle of a zombie-apocalypse story and do it in a way that’s not too cheesy and actually works, then you’ve reached peak TV, in my book…

**”Progress,” you see, was white people taking over more and more of the nation under “manifest destiny.” The land’s natives had to be dispensed with and their territory taken from them, slaves from Africa had to be instrumental to profiteering, environmental destruction for the purpose of profiteering had to be done in the name of “progress,” etc., etc.

Put down that ‘woke’ hammer; blaming whitey for everything isn’t the solution

If all that you have is a “woke” hammer, then everything looks like a fucking nail. And if you hate whitey enough, you can blame whitey for everything — even five black cops murdering a young black man in a city run largely by black people.

As I indicated in my last post, a central problem that I have with “woke”-ism is that not only does it reduce all of our sociological problems to race and racism, but it also simply reverses the racism of the past; in the past, it was white people good and black people bad, and in today’s topsy-turvy, “woke” sociopolitical environment, it’s black people good and white people bad.

We’re not going by character or conduct — but only by race. Which is — I can’t say it enough — racist.

Even though Tyre Nichols was murdered by five black cops, the “woke” media are falling over each other and twisting themselves into fucking pretzels to find a way to blame Nichols’ murder on anti-black white racism nonethefuckingless.

To be clear, anti-black white racism is indeed the background in which the United States of America was founded, and of course it remains as part of the American backdrop. (Also, of course, there is an ugly history of white racism against Native Americans, Latinos, Asians, et. al. Historically in the United States, whites even have hated other whites, such as how the Irish were discriminated against by other, non-Irish whites.)

However, try using this background racism as your criminal “defense” in a court of law. (Seriously, good luck with that.)

No, in a court of law, you are responsible for your own fucking conduct. The law does not even attempt to sort out how much of your criminal behavior is or is not because of systemic racism.*

An example of the “woke” media that I mentioned above is The Washington Post piece titled “Black Memphis Police Spark Dialogue on Systemic Racism in the U.S.”

If you click on the links naming the three authors of the piece, you’ll see from their photos that all of them look like they just crawled out from their collegiate “safe space” yesterday.

Not to side too much with the Repugnican-fascists, but methinks that today’s young “reporters” indeed have been indoctrinated with “woke”-ism.

To be clear, we need to talk about systemic racism. It’s a thing. It’s been with us Americans for a very long time and it will remain with us for some time to come.

But it’s intellectually lazy, if not also intentionally intellectually dishonest, to think that we can ascribe everything to systemic racism. Again, when all that you have is a “woke” hammer, everything looks like a nail.

Not to pick on The Washington Post; for the most part I think that their reporting and analysis are fairly solid, but can we please please please have some older people — you know, people with some actual life experience — doing more of the reporting than newly minted college grads? (I get it that younger people will work for a lot less money than older people who know when they’re not being paid what they’re worth, but Jesus fuck.)

The aforementioned Post article does contain some useful information — information that contradicts its own headline, actually.

It quotes an Ayanna Robinson saying that “one of the major reasons she thought many people seemed more subdued in response to the Nichols death was that the five officers charged in beating him are Black. If the officers had been White, [she said,] ‘All hell would have broken loose. The city would have been in war.'”

Yup. That’s pretty much what I said yesterday.

The aforementioned Post article also notes:

The Memphis Police Department, which has nearly 2,000 officers, is 58 percent Black, the result of a decades-long effort to field a police force that resembles the city’s 64 percent Black population. Unlike in several recent high-profile police brutality cases, Memphis Police Chief Cerelyn Davis, who is Black, and other officials acted swiftly in firing, arresting and charging the Memphis officers in advance of the release of video footage.

So the Memphis Police Department is led by a black woman and 58 percent of its officers are black. It sounds to me like blacks pretty much run the Memphis Police Department.

And that’s fine by me, since the city is 64 percent black; a police department should resemble the city in which it operates.

But how in the fucking fuck can we contort ourselves enough to assert, with straight faces, that even though five black cops in a majority-black police department in a majority-black city led by a black police chief brutally murdered a young black man, it nonetheless was because of whitey?

How about addressing toxic masculinity? How about addressing authoritarianism? How about addressing police brutality?

Oh, we can (and probably will) continue to ignore those problems and still find interesting ways to make everything all about and only about race and racism (which, usually under “woke”-ism, can be perpetrated only by white people, of course — by definition).

But if we do that — if we don’t put down our hammer that’s only in search of “racist” nails and pick up some other tools for fucking once — it’s clear that only more black people are going to die at the hands of cops (cops of all races).

What does it say about us that rather than seek real solutions, we’d rather just knee-jerkingly, “woke”-ly label everything “white racism” — and just be done with it already?

P.S. Also, of course, the “woke” “argument” that the five black cops who killed Tyre Nichols all were just more or less hypnotized by systemic anti-black white racism strips them of their agency. Do we think so lowly of black men that we believe that they have no agency, no free will, but that they are mere puppets of their societal background?

Is that really our “argument”? Because that sounds not only incredibly condescending, but also ironically racist, to me.

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*I know this firsthand; I was an alternate juror on a murder trial in which the defense attorney, who was incredibly lame, tried to claim that his black defendant, on trial for the murder of another black man, was there in the courtroom, being tried for murder, because of racism.

The tactic failed spectacularly. (The defendant was found guilty and is now in prison, by the way; as an alternate juror I didn’t get to weigh in on the verdict, as no regular juror had to drop out, but had I participated in the verdict, I’d have deemed him guilty, as the state’s case against him was strong.)

Why Memphis REALLY is different

Street surveillance video captured the savage beating death of a young black man, Tyre Nichols, by five black cops earlier this month in Memphis, Tennessee. The young black man had tried to flee from the police after they had stopped him for alleged reckless driving, but the information that we have thus far indicates that he posed no serious physical threat to them.

The Atlantic recently ran a commentary by Juliette Kayyem, who worked in the Barack Obama administration, titled “Why Memphis Is Different.”

And while I don’t disagree with most of her arguments — she correctly cites some of the smaller factors as to “why Memphis is different” — there is a glaring omission in her piece.

Kayyem writes:

… But as Friday night [the night of the day that the police videos of the killing of 29-year-old Tyre Nichols were released] unfolded, the protests remained peaceful; news reports showed Americans in various cities righteously and nonviolently demanding justice. We have witnessed many peaceful protests in response to police violence before, but there was one noticeable difference this time around: Rollout of the video footage seemed highly choreographed.

By the time protesters were chanting in the streets, the five officers who had beaten Nichols, a 29-year-old Black man, had already been charged with second-degree murder. By the time the video footage of the attack was released, the anger and dismay had already been predicted; law-enforcement and political leaders had issued statements preparing the public for some of the worst police violence this nation has seen. The Memphis police chief likened Nichols’s beating to that of Rodney King in 1991. These officials were right: The footage was brutal, at times unbearable, with Nichols appearing not to resist the officers as they repeatedly struck him. All of this reveals the sad fact that, because of the sheer number of times Americans have now confronted videos of police officers killing Black citizens, public officials have gotten better at managing the shock. …

Again, I agree with most of this, and I agree with Kayyem’s assertion that “the quick firing of the five police officers involved, even before criminal charges were filed, and before the videos were made public … rarely happens, but it is the correct response when the facts are impossible to defend.”

But what Kayyem and others who are “woke” don’t want to talk about is that in today’s “woke” sociopolitical environment, the race of the cop or cops is what matters most when a black person is killed by a cop or cops.

Indeed, take the seminal case of Michael Brown.

The blatant lie quickly spread that in August 2014, young black man Michael Brown had just been walking in his neighborhood in Ferguson, Missouri, minding his own business, when a white cop accosted Brown only because of Brown’s race.

The big lie was that Brown put his hands up in surrender, and the white cop just shot him anyway — because Brown was black.*

The Eric Holder U.S. Department of Justice report on the Michael Brown case, which was released in March 2015, tells a whole different story: “Gentle giant” Michael Brown, in actuality, had stolen cigarillos from a storekeeper and also had physically roughed up the storekeeper (this was caught on the store’s surveillance camera).

It was these criminal actions of Brown that drew the police presence to him in the first place.

When the cop — who was (and probably still is…) white — responded to the report of a black male who had stolen cigarillos and saw Brown walking with cigarillos in his hand, he then of course confronted Brown.

Brown responded not by cooperating with the cop — but by trying to take the cop’s gun from him. (Because that always ends well…) And that is why Brown was shot to death by the white cop.

These actual events are quite a different story from the “Hands up — don’t shoot!” myth and meme that immediately came out of the Brown episode. (Repeat a lie early and often, and it easily can become “history.”)

Why do I rehash the myth of Michael Brown?

To prove a point: It was so fucking important to the black community of Ferguson and elsewhere within the United States to turn the Brown case into yet another “example” of white-on-black persecution that the fucking facts of what actually had happened on that fateful day that Michael Brown, who was 18 years old, made a series of poor decisions that ultimately led to his own death, were wholly dispensable.

Making Michael Brown a proxy-martyr in the war between whites and blacks trumped all else.

Tyre Nichols’ death is much more horrific than Brown’s. Why? Because while Nichols had the shit beaten out of him by five cops, there is no report or evidence that Nichols did anything like Brown did, such as to try to relieve a police officer of his gun. If I tried to relieve a cop of his or her gun, I wouldn’t expect it to end well. I wouldn’t expect, however, to be beaten to death by five cops when I posed no actual serious harm to them.

So why no rioting, looting, vandalism, etc. in the wake of Tyre Nichols’ death?

Easy answer: Because the five cops who participated in his death are all black. (And also, of course, because the police chief of Memphis is a black woman.)

Nichols’ death by cop doesn’t have the crucial element in it for “woke”sters to be able to exploit it: white cop(s) kill(s) black man.

If just one of the five cops who participated in Nichols’ slow murder had been white, I’m pretty sure that the outcome would have been different.

And that’s because of racism.

Yup — when it’s not what one does, but when it’s what one’s race is, that matters, there is a word for that: racism.

A white cop shoots a black man to death right as the black man is trying to take the cop’s gun away from him: We must act out on that!

Five black cops slowly kill a black man by beating him savagely. Well, the cops were black… We’re not going to act out on that…

Not just to pick on black Americans: Two older Asian men (not the usual suspects) recently committed two separate mass shootings of mostly Asian individuals in California. Eighteen people were killed in the two mass shootings, some of them Latino, but most of them Asian.

Has the Asian American community expressed outrage over these mass killings? No — because they were committed by members of their own racial group.

Hey, don’t fucking attack me for stating what is obvious but unpleasant; instead, ask why all that we really care about in these killings is the race of the perpetrators.

Ask why we turn interracial killings into proxy battles in our ongoing “woke” race wars — and why we so easily shrug off intraracial killings. Ask why we think that it’s A-OK to be killed by a member of our own race, but that it’s an unfathomable injustice to be killed by a member of another race.

This is the central problem that I have with “woke”-ism: It used to be that, in Martin Luther King Jr.’s words, the ideal sociopolitical situation is that we’re all judged not by the color of our skin, but by the content of our character. (And I’d include our conduct as a part of our character, as our character — or lack thereof — dictates our conduct.)

Under “woke”-ism, the snake is devouring its own tail; under “woke”-ism, things have gone so ridiculously far that things have returned to what we were trying to avoid in the first place: in today’s “woke” sociopolitical environment, it’s not character or conduct that matters — it’s only race that matters.

This was something that we’d more or less collectively decided decades ago is wrong — yet incredibly dystopianly, it’s A-OK today.

P.S. No, I haven’t forgotten George Floyd. As I wrote at the time of his murder, he was murdered by a cop — a white cop (to the extent that that matters, and in this case it more likely than not matters to some degree) — and I supported the protestors, even when some of their tactics would be deemed by “polite” society to be “extreme.” (This is not to say that I agree with everything that every protestor or “protestor” did anywhere in the nation using George Floyd’s murder as the pretext.)

I long have believed that you have to take every killing of a civilian by a police officer on a case-by-case basis, based upon the facts (as best as we can ascertain them; video surveillance certainly helps when it exists).

It’s mentally easier, I suppose, to just look at the race of those involved in each police incident, and make a snap judgment based primarily or even solely on the race(s) of the individuals involved. Which is, of course, racist.

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*I don’t capitalize “black” or “white”; that’s another smug, “woke” contrivance, like “Latinx,” that I’m not on board with. Words aren’t actually magic, and we don’t actually help anyone merely by using magic words; we only feel more smug and sanctimonious when we use magic, “woke” words. (Virtue signaling is fun! Actually doing anything for anyone else is not!)

George Floyd did not die for our sins (but he did die because of them)

Getty Images news photo

Former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin surrealistically cavalierly and slowly murders George Floyd in cold blood in late May 2020 (above). Below, Chauvin is handcuffed and taken into custody in the Minneapolis courtroom yesterday immediately after having been found by a jury to be guilty of murder and manslaughter charges in the death of Floyd.

NBC News image

I was pleasantly surprised yesterday to hear that former cop Derek Chauvin most likely will spend many years behind bars after he egregiously murdered George Floyd last year; it’s quite rare that murderous cops ever actually are convicted of murder.

Not to pick on Nancy Pelosi too much — although I think that she should have hung it up years ago — but George Floyd was murdered. Murder is, by definition, involuntary on the part of the victim.

Pelosi, in a speech yesterday, said, “Thank you, George Floyd, for sacrificing your life for justice.”

Yikes. Dictionary.com says that “to sacrifice,” as Pelosi used the verb, means to “to surrender or give up, or permit injury or disadvantage to, for the sake of something else.”

As many have pointed out, George Floyd obviously did not willingly hand over his life for “justice” — or for a little speech by an overprivileged politico who should have exited the public stage years ago. He was murdered by a white cop whose police department, according to The New York Times, “[uses] force against black people at seven times the rate of whites.”

Pelosi also said in her speech (still addressing Floyd), “because of you, and because of thousands, millions of people around the world who came out for justice, your name will always be synonymous with justice.”

I hope that the murder of George Floyd ultimately will result in a more just United States of America, but George Floyd did not exist for the rest of us to be able to use his life in any way, probably especially for our own smug self-comfort.

Until and unless we of white America get that — and put to work in the real world that understanding of how too many of us have regarded the lives of black men (and others) — there will be more murders of black men (and others) who did not have to die at the hands of our police.

It’s too late for George Floyd, but it’s not too late for us to do our best to ensure that our cops stop killing unnecessarily.

We already have an Anglo-Saxon caucus: the Repugnican Party

Associated Press news photo

This single image alone lays waste to the entire idea of white “supremacy.”

Sadly, it’s not shocking to me that at least two U.S. “representatives,” far-right-wing nut jobs Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia (pictured above) and Paul Gosar of Arizona, reportedly are trying to start an “America First Caucus” in the U.S. House of Representatives.

This proposed new caucus widely is being called the “Anglo-Saxon caucus,” since “America First” means white first, of course — even though the first Americans were not white, but were Native American and later, Mexican (indeed, Mexicans don’t cross the southern border; the southern border crossed them).

For the record, I am Anglo-Saxon. I even did DNA testing some years ago that showed my DNA most closely matching the DNA of the predominant populations of Britain and of Germany (not shocking, since more white Americans are of German descent than of any other, closely followed by those of Irish descent and then those of British descent, although the latter are considered to be under-counted).

I am not “proud” to be white any more than I am “proud” to be gay. I am what I am and others are what they are, and that’s all that it is. (To me you can be proud of an accomplishment or an achievement, perhaps, but of your DNA? I don’t fucking think so.)

White “supremacy” always has eluded me, in no small part because those who espouse it, such as Taylor Greene and Gosar, hardly are exemplars of their race. Being “supreme” would necessitate that you’re also not an abject fucktard with apparent mental illness.

And to assert that whites deserve even more representation in Congress is beyond ludicrous, of course.

Per the U.S. Census Bureau, non-Latino whites make up 60 percent of the U.S. population — yet per the Pew Research Center, only 23 percent of those in Congress are not white, meaning that whites, at 77 percent of those in Congress, are significantly over-represented in Congress according to their makeup of the U.S. population. Today’s Congress is the most diverse Congress ever, and Congress keeps getting more diverse, per Pew, but whites still are over-represented in it.

Of course, Taylor Greene, Gosar & Co. haven’t broken with their party as much as they are just breaking the Repugnican Party’s long-standing unspoken rule: be racist, of course, but don’t ever openly, publicly admit it.

Indeed, per Pew, “Among today’s [U.S.] senators and representatives, the overwhelming majority of racial and ethnic minority members are Democrats (83%), while 17% are Republicans.”

That statistic alone speaks volumes about how serious the Repugnican Party is about representing non-whites in the halls of power.

An “America First Caucus” or “Anglo-Saxon Caucus” in the House would be pretty fucking redundant. We already have one: they’re called the Repugnicans.

But I wholeheartedly encourage the Repugnicans to continue along these sick and twisted lines; anything to speed up the approaching extinction of the backasswards Repugnican Party is a wonderful fucking thing.

In the meantime, the rest of us need to continue the ongoing work of making the United States of America a more perfect union — which would mean, among many other things, that “America” or “American” doesn’t mean white, but means only the geographic area of the United States or a person residing in or having come from the United States of America.*

E pluribus unum, bitches.

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*I’m not big on dividing ourselves by nationality, and/or by citizenship status either, but, you know, baby steps…

Pussygrabber kills again

European Pressphoto Agency news photo

Officials with a county medical examiner’s office remove a body from one of three Atlanta-area massage parlors where a young white man shot and killed eight people, including six women of Asian descent, on Tuesday. Former “President” Pussygrabber, seeking to scapegoat Asians for his own stunning failure to effectively deal with the novel coronavirus pandemic, contributed heavily to the anti-Asian sentiment that is taking lives.

Admittedly, when word first started coming out that Asian Americans and others of Asian descent were being victimized in racist attacks within the U.S., I was a bit dubious. In my everyday life I don’t hear anti-Asian sentiment expressed — per the U.S. Census Bureau, 19 percent of those who live in the California city where I live are of Asian descent, compared to only 6 percent of all people nationwide — and the anecdotal stories just didn’t jibe with my own observations.

Of course, I wouldn’t associate with someone who expressed anti-Asian sentiment. We do, over time, cultivate our own personal social environments; it’s kind of like the idiots who claim that of course former “President” Pussygrabber actually won “re”-election in 2020 — because they don’t know anyone who voted for Joe Biden!

Attacks on Asian Americans and others of Asian descent on U.S. soil are quite undeniable now, however. We have video. (In the case of the video that I just linked to, in San Francisco recently, an elderly woman of Asian descent fought back against her 39-year-old white-male accused attacker, who apparently quite karmically actually was taken away in a stretcher.)

And the “woke” war on whitey is ongoing, I know fully well, but know that not all of the attacks on Asian Americans are committed by stupid white men; a 28-year-old black man has been charged with attacking elderly Asian Americans in Oakland’s Chinatown. And also in Oakland, a 26-year-old black man has been charged with the murder of an elderly man of Asian descent; police say that the murder defendant “has a history of victimizing elderly Asian people.”

To my knowledge it hasn’t been determined whether the black men’s immediate motive was race-based hatred or robbery (perhaps seeing elderly Asian individuals as easy pickings).

But racism has to play a role in many if not most (if not almost all) assaults on those of Asian descent; it’s in the background if it’s not also in the foreground.

Robert Aaron Long, 21 years old and white, will live in infamy for having gunned down eight people in three massage parlors in the Atlanta area on Tuesday. Six of his eight gun-murder victims were women of Asian descent.

Long has claimed that he perpetrated his massacre not out of race-based hatred, but out of the pain and suffering stemming from his “sexual addiction.” (Women always are to blame for heterosexual men’s horniness, aren’t they?)

Clearly, to Long, the lives of women of Asian descent were disposable (or he wouldn’t have disposed of them), and that’s because in the conservative white-male culture, women aren’t full human beings, and Asian women are even less so. Asian women — many of whom are demure and submissive (or who at least are perceived as such) — are here for our use, after all!

In the background of all of this is the fact that former “President” Pussygrabber frequently spouted off racist, xenophobic words that of course his mouth-breathing, knuckle-dragging followers (and even just some dull-minded people listening to him) were going to take as carte blanche to attack those of Asian descent.

As I noted on December 31, I tried to watch then-“President” Pussygrabber’s New Year’s address, but I could not, as I immediately was turned off by his sickening use of the phrase “the China virus.” I wrote:

I came across a YouTube video of Pussygrabber’s New Year message. I wanted to know how much of it I could stomach. I mustered up my courage and started to watch the video.

The results of my experiment? I literally couldn’t stomach even a full 15 seconds of it.

By 15 seconds in, Pussygrabber uses the phrase “the China virus” to refer to the novel coronavirus/COVID-19.

Seriously, after I heard “the China virus,” I’d had more than enough already; I was done, sick to my stomach already, and I clicked out of the video and I don’t intend to ever watch any more of it.

So much is propagandistically packed into those three “little” words: “the China virus.” …

So [the ignorant mangling of the English language to use the noun “China” as an adjective] hits me immediately with “the China virus,” but then, secondly, there is the xenophobia and the racism that “the China virus” is supposed to evoke. That’s some sick fucking shit. Adolf Hitler had his Jews. Coming into the White House, “President” Pussygrabber had Mexican immigrants as his own personal Jews; leaving the White House, Pussygrabber has Asians as his own personal Jews.

Scapegoating is a hallmark of fascism. This is why Pussygrabber makes me sick to my stomach: because fucking fascists make me sick to my stomach.…

And, I noted then, “it’s far from definitively scientifically concluded that the novel coronavirus actually originated in China. Maybe it did; maybe it did not.”

Even if it did, however, of course there is no link between the original nation of the novel coronavirus and the people of Asian descent whom you see on the street.

But, of course, those who are going to verbally and physically attack innocent others aren’t known for their intellect.

Still, it’s up to all of us to change the environment in which some people believe it’s OK to attack a person of Asian descent — just for being a person of Asian descent.

I should have registered my December 31 objection to Pussygrabber’s use of “the China virus” (and “the kung flu”) more forcefully, and as a nation, we collectively should have called Pussygrabber out, loudly, back then. Instead, we fairly allowed ourselves to become inured to his casual fascism and racism.*

Shame on Pussygrabber, shame on his fascist, fucktarded followers (redundant), and shame on all of us for not doing more to protect every individual from being attacked because of his or her or their very being.

We’re not a free nation until all of us are free.

—

*Well, in fairness to all of us, in November we did vote the piece of shit out of office by more than 7 million votes…

Minneapolis burning

Associated Press news photo

I can’t find it within myself to criticize what the protesters are doing in Minneapolis in reaction to yet another murder of an unarmed black man by a white cop (see example photo above).

Human life is far, far more valuable than is property (and money), and the powers that be are fucking lucky if mere property destruction is all that happens to them after what happened to George Floyd in Minneapolis on Monday (and after what happens to the perpetually downtrodden people of this “Christian,” capitalist nation every fucking day*).

I mean, we’re way past guillotine time.

The video is chilling (another video is here): George Floyd (pictured above), who was 46 years old and whose alleged crime was trying to pass counterfeit currency (which, it seems to me, you could do quite unknowingly), pleads that he cannot breathe as a white thug-cop has his knee planted firmly on Floyd’s neck, pinning Floyd to the ground.

Bystanders are loudly voicing their concern for Floyd’s medical well-being to the cops, but the cops ignore them. (You’d think that the cops had fucking learned something after the 2014 murder of 43-year-old black man Eric Garner, who also pleaded “I can’t breathe” as he was choked to death by a white thug-cop — for allegedly having illegally sold cigarettes on the street.) Before long, Floyd’s body is lifeless and then put on a gurney, and in the video footage it appears to me that perhaps his bladder apparently had emptied itself involuntarily because of the trauma.

Here is a screen grab from the video footage of Floyd’s murder:

Getty Images news image

The murderer, one 44-year-old Derek Chauvin (who certainly puts the Chauvin in chauvinist), who is white (of course), obviously is a bad cop — who was aided and abetted by his cop colleagues who could have prevented Floyd’s murder but who did not and who thus are accessories to his murder.

Look how casual and comfortable Chauvin appears to be as he snuffs the life out of Floyd, and please give me some credible evidence that it’s ever OK for a cop to restrain someone like this, especially when the individual is unarmed and, as the video footage shows, already handcuffed.

Some of the images coming out of Minneapolis in reaction to Floyd’s sickening murder by bad cop are great.

Here is what happened to a police station:

Reuters news photo

And here, cops protect the home of Chauvin, who is the “man” who is the least worth protecting on the entire fucking planet:

New York Times news photo

Look at the resources that the fascist, mostly white and mostly white-supremacist cops (all of them in the photo above appear to be white) will use to protect one of their own, even if he’s a fucking murderer.

So much for “law and order” and “to protect and to serve.” Law and order is something that only we serfs are supposed to respect — the elites and their protectors, including the cops — are exempt from the law and from order, and the cops protect and serve only each other and their plutocratic overlords.

All of the fallout from Floyd’s murder is the fault of corrupt cops who are drunk on their own power, enabled by the elite and even egged on by our fascist, white-supremacist “president” (after all, he thinks that the fascist cops will protect him if he tries to remain in the White House after it’s time for him to fucking leave).

If the cops didn’t routinely murder people, especially unarmed black men who pose no real danger to them, these protests wouldn’t happen. So shut the fuck up about property damage while you don’t give a fuck how many people, mostly people of color and poor people, the cops physically abuse and even murder.

Clearly, previous protests over murders by cops haven’t worked, so don’t claim that the people just need to protest peacefully and things then magically will improve.

No, not until the powers that be finally are rattled to their core — not until they get a big taste of the horrors that they routinely inflict upon others without a second thought — can real, lasting change ever occur.

At this point, there’s really only one thing left to say:

Burn. It. Down.

—

*The novel coronavirus pandemic has revealed so much about the United States of America, not just how its for-profit health-care wealth-care system is entirely unequipped to deal with a nationwide public-health crisis because it’s only been geared toward profiteering, and how working-class Americans intentionally are kept only one paycheck away from destitution in order to keep us in line, but also how casually Americans are willing to sacrifice the lives of their fellow Americans to the golden calf of capitalism by demanding that we reopen everything and go back to what we call “normal” — the consequences of a potentially lethal virus be damned.

Similarly, look at how so many Americans, most of whom claim to be “Christians,” pathologically see nothing wrong with black men being essentially summarily executed for such relatively minor alleged crimes as passing a counterfeit bill and unlawfully selling cigarettes. This is way beyond sick.

Say his name: Ahmaud Arbery was lynched in Georgia in February

Photo published by The New York Times

Ahmaud Arbery, 25 years old, was lynched in Georgia in February, and we might never have heard of his lynching if some video footage of it had not emerged.

I don’t believe in using inflammatory racial language, such as the word “lynching,” lightly.

For example, in late January 2019 my U.S. Sen. Kamala Harris referred to the then-fresh Jussie Smollett case as “an attempted modern-day lynching.” She might have waited a bit before she made that proclamation, which very apparently turned out to be very much not the case.

There is no other word that I can think of, though, for what happened to Ahmaud Arbery, the 25-year-old black man who was shot down in the street in broad daylight by a white man and his white son in Brunswick, Georgia, on February 23, which we apparently are hearing about now only because some video taken by a witness of the incident has emerged.

It is not clear to me which one or if both of the men arrested for the crime, 64-year-old Gregory McMichael and his 34-year-old son Travis McMichael, shot and killed Arbery, but their story, even if true, is bullshit.

The McMichaels’ story is that they believed that Arbery was the suspect in neighborhood burglaries. Therefore, they pursued him, with firearms in their possession.

How the fuck does this story exculpate them in any way?

Even if Arbery were indeed a neighborhood burglar — it is believed that he was simply jogging in the neighborhood, not running away because he was a criminal — you don’t get to chase down someone you believe committed or might have committed a crime (or was about to commit a crime or might do so in the future) and then execute him or her on the fucking spot. You call the fucking police.

Because Arbery was black and very apparently unarmed and had not threatened anyone with any harm, and because he was killed by vigilantes who did not kill him in anything remotely like self-defense, he was killed primary because of his race — he was, in a word, lynched.

This is what happened in the “good old days” in the South (and elsewhere within the U.S., but mostly in the South): Whites would accuse a black person, usually a male, of some crime, and then apprehend and publicly kill him. Maybe the individual had committed a crime or not; that didn’t matter. What mattered most was that the victim was black.

Ahmaud Arbery was not hanged from a tree while the white denizens of the Georgia neighborhood enjoyed the display as a form of entertainment, as they did back in the day.

But Arbery was lynched, regardless.

Kamala Harris had it wrong in the Smollett case, but I guess that I stand corrected on her attempt to get federal anti-lynching legislation passed. She started this effort, with Cory Booker and Tim Scott, back in 2018, with the Justice for Victims of Lynching Act, and while at the time that struck me as a purely political, identity-politics move — a “solution” looking for a problem that no longer even existed — I am sad to apparently have to stand corrected.

Wikipedia describes the anti-lynching act as “a proposed bill that would classify lynching, defined as bodily injury on the basis of perceived race, color, religion or nationality, a federal hate crime in the United States. The bill, largely symbolic, aims to recognize and apologize for historical governmental failures to prevent lynching in the U.S.”

Yes, but apparently it’s not only symbolic anymore.

Wikipedia also notes that “On February 26, 2020, the Emmett Till Anti-Lynching Act, a revised version of the Justice for Victims of Lynching Act, passed the House of Representatives by a vote of 410-4.” (This was just three days after the lynching of Ahmaud Arbery in Georgia.)

To my knowledge, this federal anti-lynching legislation remains unpassed by the Senate and not signed into law by the “president.”

This federal law needs to be enacted, and we could call it the Ahmaud Arbery Anti-Lynching Act just as well.

And while I’m generally opposed to the death penalty, I can’t say that the likes of Gregory McMichael and Travis McMichael deserve to still draw breath.

The death penalty is an egregious penalty, but lynching — actual lynching, not Jussie Smollett-style “lynching” — is an egregious crime that calls for an egregious punishment.

There is not, and there should not be, affirmative action for elections

Getty Images photo

Your race and your biological sex aren’t qualifications for elected office, whether you were born a white male or a non-white female (or non-white male).

The identity politicians are apoplectic that white men are the front-runners for the 2020 Democratic Party presidential nomination.

Indeed, most nationwide polls of Democratic presidential preference taken over the past two weeks or so show Joe Biden at No. 1, Bernie Sanders at No. 2 and Pete Buttigieg at No. 3.

Kamala Harris, a two-fer for the identity politicians, had been in third place for a long time before she was bumped (perhaps only temporarily — who knows?) by Buttigieg.

Politico reported a few days ago:

Houston — The women of color who packed into a university auditorium here Wednesday for a first-of-its-kind presidential forum delighted in the rhetoric of candidates who vowed to make Donald Trump a one-term president.

But their frustration was just as palpable — over the heavy media attention being paid to white male candidates in the early days of the Democratic primary, and over polling they contended is feeding a misleading narrative that only a white man can defeat Trump.

“With all due respect to the vice president, he hasn’t even announced yet but he’s the front-runner?” Leah Daughtry, a political operative and former Democratic National Committee official who helped organize the “She the People” event, said of Joe Biden [who would go on to officially announce the next day].

“Racism and sexism are part of the fabric and the fiber and the founding of our country,” she added, “and the way that the [Democratic] candidates are being treated, it just reminds you of that. We’re not past it.” …

Thing is, it seems that the identity politicians’ belief is that we, the people (on the Democratic side, anyway), must support, preferably, a non-white female candidate for president (if it must be a male, he must be non-white).

But electoral politics don’t work that way. The people support and vote for whomever they support and vote for (even when they support and vote for appallingly awful candidates such as George W. Bush and Pussygrabber).

There isn’t, and there cannot be, affirmative action in democratic politics, because democratic politics is all about choice — not about having candidates of certain demographics rammed down the throats of the populace.

I understand the frustration and disappointment over the fact that female and non-white candidates are campaigning but aren’t gaining traction. Kamala Harris as of late can’t make it to even 10 percent in most nationwide polls, and Elizabeth Warren can’t do as well as even Harris, and Cory Booker is behind both Harris and Warren.

Beto O’Rourke is polling right around where Warren is — proof, methinks, that merely being a white man isn’t enough.

Harris, Warren, Booker and O’Rourke all, in my book, lack substance and/or charisma. Harris doesn’t have much of either, Warren has a lot of substance but not a lot of charisma, Booker has neither and ditto for O’Rourke, whose laughably contrived “charisma” isn’t charisma at all, because you can’t fake charisma; you have it or you don’t.

Obviously, because every U.S. president except for Barack Obama has been a white male (and Obama is half-white), within the collective American psyche, apparently, is the belief, if even subconscious, that the president should be a white man. Many, many women even hold this belief, even consciously (most of them are Repugnicans, but still…).

Obama overcame this challenge because of his charisma — and also because, as he acknowledged himself, “I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views.” (Indeed, upon that blank screen I projected — because of his campaign’s relentless, ubiquitous promises of “hope” and “change” — that Obama would be a progressive president. Boy, was I punk’d!)

Obama, an astute political opportunist, struck while the iron was hot; his window of political opportunity was rare and unique and it was brief. For Harris or Booker to believe that she or he easily could replicate Obama’s success simply because of his or her race not only is cynical and shallow and superficial, but quite obviously dead wrong.

I support Bernie Sanders not because he’s an old white guy — I loathe “President” Pussygrabber, but not because he’s an old white guy, but because he’s a fascist, treasonous criminal who wasn’t even actually elected — but I support Bernie because of those candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination in the top three tiers (which I define as consistently polling at 3 percent or more in nationwide polls), he has the most experience in D.C. and is the most progressive, entirely unlike Creepy Uncle Joe, who is an obsolete Clintonian sellout.

I easily could argue that Bernie is the only true Democrat in the race, which is ironic, given how often he is criticized for not actually being a Democrat.

My second choice probably would be Warren, even though her campaigning has been tone deaf and even though it does bother me at least a bit that as recently as the 1990s she was a Repugnican.

The reason I’m not giving Warren money or otherwise actively supporting her is because the polls of those within her own party clearly show that she isn’t exciting them, and I don’t and won’t squander my money, time, energy and emotional investment on a candidate who can’t excite even his or her own base.

My third choice probably would be Buttigieg, but I’m still gun shy from Obama. Even though Obama was an unknown, I put my support behind him, hoping for that change, and I was bitterly disappointed to see that we didn’t get change, but for the most part got only more of the same. Obama was a caretaker president at best.

So I can’t dive in and blindly support Buttigieg, as I did Obama.

Plus, Buttigieg isn’t ready to be president. He’s precocious and ambitious, to be sure, but I don’t think that it’s time to turn over the Oval Office to him. I’d love him to run for governor or for the U.S. Senate — and win (and then do a good job in the office) — first.

And, unlike how the craven identity politicians would support (probably exclusively) only someone who shares their own demographics, I’m not going to support Buttigieg primarily or even solely because he’s a gay white man like I am. It’s not enough that he and I both happen to white, male, and not heterosexual. This isn’t junior fucking high school.

Again, if it’s indeed the case that most American voters believe that the president should or even must be a white man, that’s sad, but, in a democracy, in which the voters are free to elect whomever they wish to elect, whether you or I agree with their choices or not, what, exactly, can be done about that?

That was a rhetorical question, but I’ll answer it anyway: qualified candidates who aren’t male and who aren’t white should continue to run for office, from local office to the presidency. Over time, their candidacies, successful or not, will change the national psyche. I know of no other democratic way.

Finally, it also should be pointed out that Biden and Bernie have run for president before, which is a huge reason that they are at No 1 and No. 2. On the national political stage they are fairly known quantities, unlike the likes of Harris and O’Rourke and Buttigieg. (Sadly, the problem with candidates such as Booker and Warren apparently is that they are known quantities…)

Ironically, at least for now, anyway, it seems to be Buttigieg who is filling the “hope” and “change” spot — that is, he is the bright and shiny newcomer on whom many voters seem willing to take the chance. (It had looked like that spot would be filled be O’Rourke, but he has turned out to be the flash in the pan that it was pretty clear he was going to be.)

And I’m sure that many black Americans, who tend to be homophobic, are pretty incensed that a gay white man apparently has displaced Kamala Harris, who “deserves” the presidential nomination because she’s a black woman, you see; the way that she was born are her “qualifications,” which is ironic, given that we’ve established that merely having been born a white male aren’t qualifications.

What I’m hoping is that young progressive politicians now, such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Katie Porter and Rashida Tlaib (and Buttigieg!), get more and more electoral and governance experience under their belts and give us the diverse bench of qualified presidential candidates that we don’t really have now.

That, to me, seems to be the best solution — not to piss and moan ad infinitum that the American people apparently still prefer presidential candidates who are white men.

Whining incessantly about “sexism” and “misogyny” — while ignoring her glaring flaws and shortcomings as a presidential candidate — didn’t help Billary Clinton the last go-around.

Further such whining isn’t ever going to work in the future.

My take: Jussie Smollett made it all up

Actor Jussie Smollett cried during his first television interview after allegedly having been the victim of a hate crime on January 29. Meh. He very most likely was crying wolf. (He appears to me to be acting — fairly poorly — in that interview, by the way.)

I’ve been quiet on the alleged hate crime against TV show “Empire” star Jussie Smollett on January 29 in Chicago.

My inclination is to believe the victim, or at least to give the alleged victim the benefit of the doubt, anyway, but Smollett’s story was a bit over the top from the get-go: two male attackers, he claimed, poured bleach on him and put a noose around his neck and yelled, “This is MAGA country!” as well as racist and homophobic slurs.

Smollett initially reported that his attackers wore ski masks, but presumably they were white, since allegedly they had perpetrated a race-based hate crime against him and yelled “This is MAGA country!” (Indeed, in the TV interview mentioned above, by elimination he pretty much claims that his attackers were indeed white, which he apparently could see even though they were wearing ski masks.)

The details of the alleged hate crime against Smollett and its subsequent investigation are convoluted and go back and forth, with ample yes-but-no-but-no-but-yes. (You can read them here and here and in many other places on the Internet.) I won’t rehash all of them here.

But CNN reports today:

Two law enforcement sources with knowledge of the investigation tell CNN that Chicago Police believe actor Jussie Smollett paid two men to orchestrate an assault on him that he reported late last month.

The men, who are brothers, were arrested Wednesday but released without charges Friday after Chicago police cited the discovery of “new evidence.

“The sources told CNN the two men are now cooperating fully with law enforcement.

Smollett told authorities he was attacked early January 29 by two men who were “yelling out racial and homophobic slurs.” He said one attacker put a rope around his neck and poured an unknown chemical substance on him.

The sources told CNN there are records that show the two brothers purchased the rope found around Smollett’s neck at a hardware store in Chicago.

CNN’s attempts Saturday to reach both Smollett’s representative and attorney were unsuccessful.

Smollett identifies as gay and since 2015 has played the gay character of Jamal on the Fox TV drama “Empire.”

According to Chicago Police spokesman Anthony Guglielmi, the actor told detectives he was attacked by two men near the lower entrance of a Loews hotel in Chicago. Police were told the two men yelled “‘Empire’ fa***t” and “‘Empire’ n***er'” while striking him.

The day after the incident, police released surveillance images that showed two silhouetted individuals walking down a sidewalk, and police said they were wanted for questioning.

The two men were arrested Wednesday. Police on Friday said the men were being viewed as “potential suspects” and that detectives had “probable cause that they may have been involved in an alleged crime.” [Note that that crime was not specified…]

But by Friday night they had been released, Guglielmi said, “due to new evidence as a result of today’s investigations.”

“And detectives have additional investigative work to complete,” he added.

One of the men has appeared on “Empire,” Guglielmi said. A police source also told CNN on Friday night that the men had a previous affiliation with Smollett, but did not provide additional details. …

It was reported that Smollett might have made up the attack because he feared that he was about to be written out of “Empire” — and presumably, the show-runners then would be hesitant to do so after he’d been attacked in a hate crime — but the show-runners have denied that Smollett’s role ever was in jeopardy. (Of course, for public relations reasons — to keep their target audience — they could be lying about that…)

In any event, if I had to put money on it, for whatever reason, I surmise, Smollett indeed made the whole thing up.

Not only was his initial report over the top — it would be rare for hate-crime attackers, who don’t tend to be all that smart or creative, to do all of the things that he alleged — and certainly they would have had to have been stalking him already, since they allegedly came prepared with props (bleach and a noose). And further, somehow they knew exactly when to bring those props with them: when the “Empire” star just happened to be going to Subway for food around 2 a.m.

Really?

Also, would real attackers really call Smollett “‘Empire’ faggot” and “‘Empire’ nigger”? Plain-old “faggot” and/or “nigger” I could see, but I rather doubt that they would mention the show in which he stars. Again: over the top. It’s bad writing because it beggars belief.

If Smollett actually is found to not have made the whole thing up, then I’d be the first to say so (and update this post accordingly) and offer and apology, but yeah, I very much doubt that Smollett’s story, in the end, will be corroborated.

If he lied — and he wouldn’t be the first to have lied about having been the victim of a hate crime — of course he has made it worse for those who come after him who actually are the victims of hate crimes, and of course he should be prosecuted for having lied to the police.

And I’ll come out and say it: the black community hasn’t been big on defending gay people, to put it quite mildly and charitably, so it seems to me that in this case they have responded more to the alleged racist hate crime against Smollett than to the alleged homophobic hate crime against him.

Just sayin’: The Smollett case apparently not only says a lot about Smollett and what apparent bullshit story he believed would fly in this age of toxic identity politics, but says a lot about those who were so quick to claim that he had to be telling the truth — before the details of the investigation ever even came out. It’s been quite the Rorschach test. (See: confirmation bias.)

P.S. Smollett apparently even fooled “President” Pussygrabber, who called that the alleged attack on Smollett “horrible,” adding, “It doesn’t get worse.” Actually, it does get worse, sometimes a lot worse; Smollett had only superficial (self-inflicted?) skin wounds, no broken bones, no damage to any organs, and he’s still very much alive.

On that note, Kamala Harris rather dramatically called Smollett’s account “an attempted modern day lynching.”

Again, two words: confirmation bias. Harris desperately wants that black base, I know, but she might show some, um, presidential caution before commenting next time. There has been no evidence presented thus far that anyone actually was trying to lynch Smollett, for fuck’s sake.

This woman was a prosecutor? Scary…

P.P.S. Cory Booker also called the Smollett account “an attempted modern-day lynching.” Of course. Jesus fuck.

I’m not sure who tweeted that bullshit first, Harris or Booker (tweets are given time stamps, but from which time zone[s]?), but it’s hard to believe that both would use the exact same phrase without knowledge that the other had done so first.

And, again, to stoke interracial strife before the facts of an alleged incident are even established — again, hardly what I would call presidential.

P.P.P.S. It’s being reported that Smollett has hired Michael Cohen’s criminal defense attorney.

To be abundantly fair, hiring a criminal defense attorney doesn’t necessarily mean that you are guilty of a crime, but, um…