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Dont get me wrong: Its not like its the first time.

I mean, seriously, Ive gotten used to right-wingers mangling my words to suit their purposes, and attempting to smear me: either as an anti-white extremist (because even though Im white, my Jewishness supposedly leads me to secretly seek the destruction of Aryan stock), or as one who is militantly anti-Christian.

And this they seek to demonstrate, typically, by digging up tweets or Facebook posts and presenting them either out of context or dishonestly representing what those statements say, hoping that those who see their version of things wont investigate my actual comments and think for themselves.

It is a particularly pernicious kind of fake news, and it is modern currency for reactionaries, especially internet savvy younger ones who tend to take a slash-and-burn approach to their politics, and have learned these methods from the likes of the Breitbart gang and James OKeefe.

Fortunately, I have the time to reply and demonstrate the depths of their duplicity. And doing so here will serve not only to make clear the disingenuousness of the smears in this particular instance, but will also serve to demonstrate the way in which right-wing media goes about its business: namely, lying in the service of their cause.

The latest smear comes from an outfit composed of student writers, one of whom either attended my presentation at Harvard this week, or watched it on the livestream provided by the school as part of their 10th annual diversity dialogue series.

If this person was in the room when I spoke, I had no idea, because he naturally never sought me out to ask questions, or seek clarification on my views, or challenge anything I had said. Likewise, if he watched the stream he never reached out via e-mail or social media to ask me about my comments. Because thats not the style for the right. They dont want clarification. They dont want accuracy. They hide in the shadows and rather than engage, they launch sneak attacks.

In this case, a sneak attack the headline for which was as follows:

Fascinating.

Needless to say, and before beginning work on this piece, I made sure to reassure my Christian wife, Christian daughters, and Christian mother that I meant them no harm and to please carry on. I wasnt able to reach my Christian best friend of 45 years to put his mind at ease, because he lives on the West Coast and it was too early. Hopefully he hasnt since seen the headline and determined that Ive just been faking it all along, waiting for the day when I could lead him and his family to jail for their faith.

But as I read the hit-piece I realized what the author had done. He had created a click-baity headline that bore no relationship to anything I had actually said. And he had apparently spent the better part of the previous 48 hours digging through years of Tweets and Facebook posts just to find a few nuggets he could pull entirely out of context to frame his story and justify said headline. Good work if you can get it, I suppose.

Before getting to the part about locking Christians up, the piece mentions that among my anti-Christian repertoire, are previous comments in which I referred to such as Jeezoids and fascists, and insisted that people who believe in a God of hell/damnation deserve to be mocked viciously and run out of the public square.

Pretty heady stuff, to be sure. But when you click the links you discover that the interpretation of my comments is, needless to say, lacking a degree of candor.

Have I used the term Jeezoids before to describe Christians? No, not Christians writ large. I dont believe most Christians are extremists, or the kinds of fundamentalists who resemble cult members. But those who do? Oh sure, those folks qualify as the kind of robots-for-Christ who merit the designation. One can still feel that the term is mean-spirited I suppose, or unkind. But to suggest I am applying it to the whole or even most of Christendom is simply a lie.

Indeed, there were two places in which this particular troll uncovered my use of the term, and exploring the context of both makes clear his dishonesty. The first was here:

Please note the context of this comment, which was in reply to an absurd and truly despicable tweet equating the treatment of Christians in America to the treatment of blacks under Jim Crow. And who had offered this vile analogy? Why, Bryan Fischer, of course formerly of the American Family Association: a notoriously bigoted anti-gay group, which ultimately fired Fischer for being such a bigot that even they couldnt keep him on anymore.

To call Fischer and his ilk Jeezoids is not bigoted, or even hyperbolic. It is accurate. To call him a Christian would be to slur millions of actual Christians who find his views repellent. That would be the true calumny.

Among other things, Fischer has said that we need an underground railroad to rescue children from same-sex households, that homosexual conduct should be criminalized, that discriminating against LGBTQ folks is not only acceptable but morally required, that practicing homosexuals should be banned from public office, that gays are to blame for the Nazi Holocaust, that First Amendment religious freedoms only apply to Christians, and that Islam is Satanic.

These are not the views of Christians writ large. They are not the things being taught in mainline Protestant churches, or in most Catholic churches, or in the Episcopal church to which my wife and daughters belong. They arent even accurate reflections of what all evangelicals and more conservative Christians believe. They are the bigoted and extremist positions of a sub-set of Christianity, no more reflective of it than the ISIS cult is reflective of the larger universe of Islam.

To call these kinds of Christians Jeezoids is not to mock Jesus, but to mock them for so clearly straying from the teachings of Jesus. They are the ones who by their bigotry mock the one they claim to be their savior. Not me.

The second usage of Jeezoids was here:

And once again, this was specifically in regard to a group of anti-abortion extremists who had engaged in deliberately deceptive smears against Planned Parenthood, and then violated multiple court orders during the investigation of their dishonest campaign against the family planning group. These people whose actions were exposed as lies, thereby in violation of one of those Commandments handed to Moses and which people like this insist others should live by are not representative of Christians. My use of the term Jeezoids to describe them was a way of distinguishing them from Christians. Any remotely honest person would be capable of discerning this basic truth.

As for the claim that I have called Christians fascists, again, this is not a term I have used, or would use, to describe Christians as a group. But it certainly applies to the above kinds of so-called Christians, and it is quite obviously that group to whom I was referring.

As for my desire to mock and run from the public square those who believe in a God of hellfire and damnation, let us go to the receipts in this case a couple of tweets from 2012:

Once again, the author demonstrated no interest in the context of the comment, but context matters. I was not making some rando suggestion that people who believe in God should be mocked or shut down, or institutionalized. I was responding to comments made by the Rev. Franklin Graham, who suggested in the wake of Barack Obamas re-election that God may need to basically destroy America as punishment for this grave sin and the nation having turned away from God. To believe in that kind of God one who would damn a nation for re-electing the black guy whose views you disagree with is to believe in unicorns, and especially vile ones at that.

Plenty of people who believe in a deity reject that image of God. Plenty of people who believe in a creator reject the notion that this creator is one who both loves the world so much, for instance, that he would give his only Son to redeem it but also possesses the kind of hate that would allow him to condemn to eternal damnation those who dont follow that Son as their personal savior.

As much as it might shock conservative Christians, their particularistic conception of God is not universal, even among Christians. They clearly have a hard time accepting this as one can see by the recent attacks on Pete Buttigieg by Rev. Graham and others but that doesnt make it any less true.

The only people I am critiquing here, and suggesting we should mock (or perhaps have committed, which I dont really support doing, actually) are those who believe in this vengeful, abusive God who operates more like a jealous and battering husband than a loving creator. Yes, for them mockery. Yes, for them, we should marginalize them entirely in the public square in the name of reason and logic and human decency. They can believe as they wish of course. And we can make fun of their inanity. And should. Daily. Loudly.

As someone who was regularly terrorized by this bunch as a child because they saw it as their duty to tell me, as a Jew, that I was destined for a lake of fire along with all my Jewish ancestors mockery is relatively mild retribution, and utterly deserved.

Now, to the locking Christians up thing.

Once again, lets look at what I really said. As youll see below, the allegation being made against me here is dishonest on two levels: first, because it ignores the very particular group of people I was criticizing, and second, because it conveniently leaves off the latter part of the Facebook post. Which is sort of important because it is in that portion of the post that I make it clear I really dont support locking up (as in mental hospitals) people who are Christians, or believers of any kind. In other words, if one reads the entire post, one can see I wasnt serious. I was trolling right wingers and they took the bait. Because they are the snowflakes they have warned us about.

Now to the post. First, the version provided by the right-wing rag:

Hmm, sounds pretty provocative; pretty intolerant, pretty much as if maybe the headline was right after all, right? Maybe I really do think Christians should be locked up.

But no. First, again, context. I was referring specifically to the kind of so-called Christians typified by the likes of Michelle Bachmann. And in the piece to which I was specifically responding, Bachmann suggested God might actually destroy America over the issue of marriage equality.

Of course. Because even though God wasnt sufficiently pissed over the sin of slavery, segregation, mass lynching, or campaigns of genocide against indigenous peoples at least not angry enough to destroy America over them the gays getting to wed thing has really pushed him over the edge. Mmm-k.

So yes, I was saying this kind of thinking is deranged. It is a sign of mental illness or a particular kind of cognitive dysfunction. I say that not to stigmatize mental illness by the way. I suffer from anxiety and depression so Im nothing if not sympathetic. But I believe people who are mentally ill need treatment of some kind, just like people with other types of illnesses should get the same. I dont think, for instance, that Michelle Bachmann can simply pray the insanity away. Thats not how this works.

I believe that if you are basing your morality on the ancient story of Sodom and Gomorrah a story that you show no indication of understanding, as it was actually not about homosexuality at all then yes, you are unworthy of being taken seriously. You are not well. You need help. But do I actually believe you should be locked up in a rubber room? Nah, which you can easily see from the next part of the post, which the writer in this case cleverly did not include in the screen shot:

Its right there. I dont believe lunatics like this should be locked up.

I do say they must be politically destroyed, and yes, thats a strong word for defeated, but thats what it means.

I also note that they should be allowed to believe and worship as they choose but they should have no influence on the rules and norms of a pluralistic society. In other words, and per the context of the post in the first place, their religious beliefs about marriage are fine for the way they choose to live their lives. If they dont want a gay marriage then they neednt have one. But to impose their Biblical views on the rest of us is to establish their religion as tantamount to state policy, which violates the First Amendments religious freedom clause.

You dont have to like the tone of my original post here. Honestly, I dont either and in retrospect could have said it differently, and should have. It was four years ago, and although Ive occasionally slipped into such tone since, I am really trying to be gentler in my presentation, not only for strategic reasons but also for reasons of simply being kinder.

That said, and however one feels about how I made the points here, I simply did not say what I am accused of saying. And I surely did not apply even the things I did say to all or most Christians, or believers in God.

That these things could have been clarified for the writer who saw it as his duty to expose me as a hateful bigot is obvious. He could have raised his hand and asked a question about them were he in the room. He could have approached me afterwards at the book-signing, and asked about them there. Or, if he watched the livestream he could have e-mailed me to inquire about the comments, and whether I stood by them, or what I meant by them.

But he did none of these things. Because to him, and the right-wing media world he serves, clarification and discussion serve no purpose. It is all gotcha, all the time. All about the take-down. All about the manufactured outrage. All about posing as victims of leftist hatred while flacking for those who regularly dispense real hatred against LGBTQ folks among others as seen in the above examples.

Its a shame I even have to waste time responding to such nonsense. But in a world where lies can travel around the globe in the click of a button and where certain unstable people will believe those lies and threaten those about whom the lies are told one cannot allow such vicious slanders and misrepresentations to stand. I certainly will not.

But by all means, keep bearing false witness fellas. And dont let that pesky 9th Commandment get in the way.

Im an antiracism educator/author. I Facebook & tweet @timjacobwise, podcast at Speak Out With Tim Wise & post bonus content at patreon.com/speakoutwithtimwise

This post was previously published on Medium and is republished here with permission from the author.

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Anatomy of a Smear - The Good Men Project