Senator Scott Wiener Lied

a close reading reveals his bullshit

California Senator Scott Wiener tweeted an alleged “death threat” that he received:

When people called him out on the obviousness of this fake—including the fact that it includes his cursor, and thus he obviously typed it himself, he claimed it was a voicemail transcription. Six hours later, he thought of that and tweeted this explanation in reply.

He is lying. Automatic transcriptions are available on all modern phone systems. One does not have to type them oneself, and they do not generally come with autocorrect notations or a cursor. The iPhone version looks like this, as an example:

He is probably finding a voice actor to record something today that he can release later as a “voicemail,” but it will be a fake. He is lying.

If you are inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt, here’s how you can know he’s lying. Let’s do a close reading together. Here is the text that he asserted is a transcript, with all the tells I caught in bold.

---

It’s a shame you come out and you’re trying to release all these pedophiles. You’re okay with people intentionally giving other people AIDS. And your office can’t even pick up the phone to answer about these questions. You’re sick, man. I don’t even call you. You shouldn’t even be a man.

You’re sick individual. I don’t care about what you do off hours, but when you try to force it upon California, it’s like myself and others.

You’ll have something coming to you.

People like you won’t be able to walk down the streets when light comes to the darkness that you’re fucking providing you piece of shit.

---

The Tells

In the first one, “And your office can’t even pick up the phone to answer about these questions,” he is pre-emptively creating an excuse for his office not fulfilling basic responsibilities. Are you one of his constituents who would like to be able to reach out by phone and get information? Too bad—those terrible MAGA hateful haters are so busy hating that he can’t possibly be expected to answer the phone!

In the second one, “You shouldn’t even be a man,” he is nudging on the only issue most of these far leftists care about enough to take risks—promotion of extreme-transgender-activist-agenda acceptance. This is meant to plant the idea that only “MAGA Extremists,” the sort of sociopaths who call and leave threatening voicemails, are interested in who’s a man and who’s a woman. Normal, non-sociopathic people just accept other people’s self-identifications without question.

In the third one, “I don’t care about what you do off hours,” he is trying to nudge everyone who does care about what their representatives do off hours—as we all should in fact care—into thinking that our caring about that is an extreme or unreasonable position. Why, even a hateful MAGA hating hater isn’t that extreme! Even those lunatics don’t care about what he does off hours!

Finally, “People like you won’t be able to walk down the streets when light comes to the darkness” is a very curious phrasing. It’s yet another nudge. The reader is meant to note the religious imagery and phrasing, associate them with the hateful MAGA Extremist hating haters, and conclude that the Senator is being victimized by a living caricature of a conservative, almost certainly a religious one.

So here we have a senator claiming to have received a “threatening” message that pre-emptively makes an excuse for his office not doing its job and contains several obvious efforts to nudge those who read it into seeing the world his way. It also has a screenshot of his cursor in it. Rather than respond to skepticism reasonably, by posting the original audio, he declares that anyone who doubts this is a “conspiracy theorist.”

This man is an elected official.

Sigh. This is where we are.

Pathetic. 0/10 for effort. Try harder, Senator.

Josh Slocum, of the Disaffected Podcast, noticed something else entirely, a much more obvious-in-retrospect tell than the ones I caught, in fact. Watch his show this Sunday, December 4, at 9pm Eastern to hear all about it.

Housekeeping: Comments are open for paid subscribers. Email hollymathnerd at gmail if you want to participate but can’t afford a paid subscription. New posts are announced via a tweet and there are some scheduled tweets linking old posts, but I’m not actively participating on Twitter. Thank you!