THE MANIPULATIVE FALSE VICTIM

My comments were recently bumped from a neighborhood digital forum for trolling, it seems. I don't know the actual reason, since the San-Francisco-based hipster web business trades in political correctness and cancel culture. My "trolling", as it was described by one social justice type, consisted of commenting on a whining post from a person who had placed an ugly lawn sign on her shared property without consulting other tenants or the owners of the property. 

Yes, folks, I was digitally cancelled for suggesting that the proliferation of ugly victim-based lawn signs in my bourgeois suburb could be seen as both aesthetically unpleasant, environmentally polluting and quite ineffective at making people submit to the propagandist commands on them. I stated all this more succinctly and diplomatically than the summary I just offered. I had dared to suggest that talking with people in one's immediate circle about issues and signs first might prove more effective.

I was piled on by a mob of cancel-culture drones. My post was dissected and parsed before it was just erased. I have not been told why. However, one of the mobsters who initially piled on has continued to push the whiner onward in complaining and ranting. He also admitted to intentionally trolling on the forum. Go figure.

The fact is that the whiner-in-chief who posted the topic was not an actual victim of anything related to the sign's propaganda. The whiner-in-chief had fomented the discord over the sign by not consulting anyone who would potentially be impacted by it. The whiner-in-chief is a provocateur. I hesitated to state this bluntly on the P.C. forum. I didn't wish to have my house fire-bombed by an Antifa psychopath.

***** 

The Smollett Effect, as I call it, has spread. As you may know, Jussie Smollett, a television actor, perpetrated a national media hoax 2019 by claiming to have been the victim of a Chicago gay bashing. He was indicted by a grand jury, indicating that there was sufficient evidence that he had indeed staged the event for publicity. 

He paid his way out of prosecution (plea deal) by forfeiting a $10,000 bond along with doing a minimal amount of community service and most likely using his personal connections within the Chicago legal system. Apparently, the hoax has triggered criminal and civil proceedings that have yet to be fully resolved. Whatever the outcome, it is fairly certain it was a publicity stunt gone wrong.

Despite the vile nature of this man's lie, he was generally supported by the Hollywood media machine and the so-called LGBTQI political machine. The message to would-be manipulators of public sentiment on issues of minority status, for any motives, was clear. 

I am beginning to suspect that some of the rush to claim victimhood is strangely perverse resistance against a mainstream culture which has accepted and mandated women's rights, gay rights, affirmative action, racial equality, age equality, and sensitivity training in just about every workplace. Legislative protections are firmly in place. The USA has more lawyers per capita than any country on the planet. Yet this somehow isn't enough for some. 

If you are a still a socially dysfunctional human being in such a generally accepting society, you must feel a total loser. Exaggerated or fabricated victimhood claims may be a cry for psychological treatment. Unfortunately, such treatment has fallen out of fashion with the same people who support a loser's false claim of victimhood. Catch 22. Today's social justice movements totally support your right to be a dysfunctional loser. 

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The whiner-in-chief of my neighborhood bulletin board garnered an avalanche of back-slapping P.C. lip service. None of the back-slappers seemed to notice that the whiner's post was itself highly racist against the neighbors who had objected to the lawn sign. The objectors' race was mentioned over and over again, as though their race alone made them horrible people. Isn't that textbook racism? And, again I stress, the whiner did not claim to be an actual victim of alleged persecution being commanded to be stopped by the ineffectual sign.