In case you haven’t guessed, my title is another way of characterizing the hoax perpetrated by actor and malefactor Jussie Smollett, currently on trial for falsely claiming he was the victim of a 2019 “hate crime.” It’s a way of framing the frame that would be quite common were the races reversed.

Of course, a white guy today doesn’t have to falsely claim anything to be demonized in media. He just has to be guilty of DWW — Defending While White, à la poor Kyle Rittenhouse or Mark McCloskey. As for Smollett, he pulls a jump-the-shark version of a “hate crime” hoax, and the media (see Robin Roberts, et al.) just nod sympathetically.

There’s nothing fanciful, after all, about claiming that two white, MAGA-hat-sporting Trump supporters running around Jussie’s Chicago neighborhood at 2 a.m. in sub-zero temperatures, carrying bleach and a noose (don’t leave home without them) attacked him and screamed “MAGA country!” (I mean, it’s not like Chicago is a liberal place or anything). Why, I myself was assaulted and called speciesist names last year by a transgender sasquatch carrying a hammer and sickle flag and singing “Sweet Transvestite” from the Rocky Horror Picture Show. These things happen.

What separates the Smollett hate hoax from most others, however, and makes it even more disgusting is a certain inversion of reality: It was yet another example of a rich, influential, left-wing individual not only playing the victim, but putting the onus on the relatively powerless. Reflecting Rittenhouse’s and the Covington Catholic kids’ background, the MAGA movement comprises mainly middle-class, Middle American people — the average guy. Yet it is he, not individuals such as the wealthy and famous Smollett, who’s cast as privileged and powerful.

This institutional power enjoyed by the world’s Smolletts is reflected in how the actor’s utterly ridiculous story was embraced by media, whether they believed it or not. Some did, of course. Leftists are detached from reality, and people who’ll swear that boys can will themselves into being girls may certainly fancy Smollett’s tale plausible. (You know how crazy those Trump supporters are, after all!) But there’s also this:

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it,” as Upton Sinclair put it.

Not only do leftists, dysfunctional people almost to a man, live in a world of rationalization, but the incentive to rationalize in the Smollett case was especially great. Consider:

Let’s say it’s early February 2019, and you’re a Robin Roberts or a Chris Cuomo (a pre-firing Fredo) and you retrieve your brain from where you checked it at the station door. You subsequently realize that Smollett’s story is about as plausible as Slick Willie’s saying “I did not have sex with that woman Monica Lewinsky.” You then report on the manifold holes in it. The result?

You’re condemned in social media, SJWs call for your head, and, even if you’re not fired, you become a pariah, suffer career damage and are expelled from the cocktail party circuit. And when you’re proven right sometime later, it doesn’t really matter, not nearly enough to negate the damage already done. This is for a simple reason.

In your Machiavellian milieu, the Truth is not relevant — the narrative is.

As in a criminal syndicate, telling the truth about misdeeds can be punished severely. The rule is: Don’t snitch. Don’t give up the game. It’s maintaining the lie that’s expected — and rewarded.

And part of the lie was that Jussie was oppressed, by something other than his own mental derangement, and that we live in a white supremacist nation.

Of course, if we did, the two co-conspirators who helped Smollett perpetrate his hoax, Nigerian immigrants Abimbola and Olabingo Osundairo, would never have been in this country in the first place. And if we did, we’d certainly be hearing as much about how three black men framed white men for a crime as we’d hear about a white-on-black frame-up that might occur today (but, strangely, never does).

Oh, and how much prison time would a white hate hoaxer get for filing a false police report and wasting thousands of hours of department manpower? Because it’s predicted that poor oppressed Jussie will skate with probation and community service.

Man, I’d like to get me some ‘a that there oppression.

Contact Selwyn Duke; follow him on Gab, MeWe, or Parler; or log on to SelwynDuke.com.