A state senator from California tweeted about a “threat” from hate mail.
As evidence, state Sen. Scott Wiener of San Francisco posted only one screenshot from a Notes app… he left his cursor in the screenshot, along with spellcheck lines.
In other words, the senator wrote his own Note.
Critics accused him of faking hate mail and compared him to Jussie Smollett, the actor known for falsifying a hate crime in 2019.
“This California state senator seriously tried to fake hate mail but included his cursor and the grammar lines in his screenshot,” one conservative strategist noted on Twitter. “Unreal.”
The senator, for his part, responded to the critiques. He claimed to have been transcribing a voicemail, and he dismissed his political opponents as “conspiracy theorists.”
“For all the MAGA conspiracy theorists out there, the threat was a voicemail. This is a transcription. But have fun spinning around with your conspiracies,” Wiener wrote on Twitter, apparently rolling his eyes.
Some conservatives called on Wiener to release the audio.
“Oh so you got a voicemail death threat and instead of posting the audio you carefully transcribed it, posted the transcript, and never even mentioned that it was a voicemail until everyone doubted your original story? Sure that makes sense, Jussie. Totally believable,” conservative author Matt Walsh wrote on Twitter.
Take a look —
This California state senator seriously tried to fake hate mail but included his cursor and the grammar lines in his screenshot.
Unreal 😂 pic.twitter.com/8b64ZC9gXW
— Greg Price (@greg_price11) December 1, 2022
Oh so you got a voicemail death threat and instead of posting the audio you carefully transcribed it, posted the transcript, and never even mentioned that it was a voicemail until everyone doubted your original story? Sure that makes sense, Jussie. Totally believable.
— Matt Walsh (@MattWalshBlog) December 1, 2022
Wiener blamed the “hate mail” on conservative commentator Charlie Kirk.
However, Wiener didn’t accuse Kirk himself of sending the voicemail himself. Rather, the senator accused Kirk of pandering to Q-Anon hysteria, siccing his fans on political opponents, and creating an environment likely to result in hate mail.
“Words have consequences,” Wiener tweeted. “Not even 24 hours after MAGA grifter Charlie Kirk tweeted homophobic lies about me, I received this threat repeating one of his lies. But that was the point: Riling people up against me & other LGBTQ people.”
The state senator had previously gone viral for blithely dismissing the risk factors for monkeypox.
“People will make their own decisions about their own risk levels,” Wiener told The Washington Post over the summer, during the height of the monkeypox outbreak. “If people want to have sex, they are going to have sex.”
The Horn editorial team